Cannot delete from PRIVATE/VAR/ROOT/.TRASH folder

Did you run any kind of "app zapper" or "clean up" app? If so, don't do that ever again.

I checked that location on my own computer. To my surprise, there were some files there. In my case, it was various old versions of Microsoft OneDrive, which I don't use. I do have Office and I'm sure that's where they came from. But I'm not happy that Microsoft's installer/updater was putting things into the trash as root. That's bad.

However, my situation has a pretty reasonable explanation. You have all kinds of different files in there. Plus, you seem to have a trash folder inside a trash folder.

You can remove these files using the command line. Run something like this:

sudo rm -Rf /private/var/root/.Trash/.Trash

I strongly recommend that you make sure you have a Time Machine backup before doing this.

Also, you should copy the above command to the clipboard and then paste it into a Terminal window. The command line is not forgiving. If you make one mistake, one extra space, one extra character - all your files are gone forever.

So when you Command click or right click on the trash can in the dock and choose "Empty Trash" that it's not removing all those files from private/var/root/.trash as well?

Just now checking this, I see that deleted files actually go into folder: /Users/your_user_name/.Trash.

I don't even have PRIVATE/VAR/ROOT/.TRASH. Assuming you have the latest version of Ventura of 13.2.1?

I installed the Trial version of Disk Drill and was never able to find a screen that shows a file list with

"Size Visualized". Can you double check if the software is in fact Disk Drill? And what version it is?

I take it back. When I use Finder to navigate to /private/var/root, I can see one is there but can't see inside of it.

What app are you using that shows "Size Visualized"?

Did you enable the root user or something?

Just as additional information, you can issue this command to view everything inside the root folder:

(In this example it's looking in the folder called .Trash.)

sudo ls -al /private/var/root/.Trash